Artist, Michel Blazy has been working since the end of the 1980s on the exploration of living things and the mutations of matter, especially via putrefaction. His evolutionary works favor the ephemeral and the humble materials, claiming the passage of time.
Michel Blazy is a tamer artist, whose work results from collaborations with snails, mosquitoes, molds or bacteria. Exhibited at the Portique (Centre d’art contemporain du Havre) until December 18, he questions, through his living works, the temporality of art and the borders between the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial. Extract of the article Encouraging the matter published in STREAM 04 : The paradoxes of the living
Involving the living directly in artwork opens up creative opportunities that question the status of the author and of the artist. For Michel Blazy, if the figure of man seems to become discreet or even disappear from his work, that of the artist remains quite present. It is less a matter of ceding power to the living, of “allowing it to happen,” at the risk of nothing happening, than of creating the conditions for emergence, of encouraging matter in the manner of a gardener. The artist observes and seeks to understand the living in order to favor its development, in such a way that the form self-generates. In this way, he explores the conditions for a domestication of the living that are symbiotic rather than exploitative. The formal fascination for the living underpins his thinking about the intelligence of survival and the frontiers between the inert and the organic. Living and art have in common the fact that they both escape understanding to some extent; the artist is not trying to deliver an unequivocal message but to share an experience—the struggle with matter in the studio—and to provoke the complexity of encounters.
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